And it's a gooooooooaaaal!

We had a very sporty session at Baby Book Club, flexing a number physical and metaphorical muscles… We read the Noisy Football Match by Sam Taplin and Lee Wildish and enjoyed using our footy vocabulary to comment on the action: a kick! a goal! a win! We loved pressing those trickier-than-they-look buttons to make the ref blow his whistle and the crowd roar. (We would have liked to see girls on the teams, but for now you'll have to look for them in the books I suggested on the sheet) (go Maisy Mouse!) (or you might check these football books for kids of all ages) 

Next, for a special treat, we went in a very orderly fashion into the hall, like a team entering the pitch. The wide open space was all ours and we made the best of it. We ran, we kicked, we passed, we dribbled, we scored. We played about 4 matches simultaneously and the parent-goalies did an excellent job too. Some of us developed a nice pass-and-shot combo, so there was even the beginnings of an element of collaboration there. 

As promised, here are the links to the songs and videos, all about the beautiful game…

Sports Balls Song for Kids by Pancake Manor

Shakira - Waka Waka (This Time for Africa) (The Official 2010 FIFA World Cup Song)

The opening of classic kids animé Captain Tsubasa, in Japanese! 

World Book Day 2019

It was all go last week for World Book Day in SMGS!
With trips to the library, chats with publishers, bookmark design sessions and lots more, everyone celebrated reading for pleasure with gusto.
Inspired by last year's success, every class turned their room door into a work of bookish art once more.
See how many favourites you can recognise and check out Room 12's nod to their very own book, Green Giraffes and Pink Elephants!

Up, up and away!

We had a ball(oon) in Baby Book Club today reading Mick Inkpen's The Blue Balloon. There was suspense and emotions aplenty while we feared the eponymous balloon might pop when the characters squeezed and squashed and crushed it. There was wonder and delight when the heroes took off and landed in foreign lands.

And then there was laughter when we took out our own balloons and made all sorts of ridiculous noises with them, emptied them out in our faces, punched them, kicked them, shook them and played conkers with them. It was a brilliant moment of experimentation and play which hopefully continued later on at home...

As always, here are the links to the songs and videos!

I Love Balloons! The Raytones! Sing-along video! 

Watch Jeff Koons talking about 'Balloon Dog (Orange)' 

Watch 50K balloons being released over Brazil to mark end of 2018

World Book Day with the Littlies!

What a bookish week it's been! Between Baby Book Club and class visits in Clondalkin Library it was all about the books!

With the babas, we read Stephanie Blake's cheeky Poo Bum and delighted in saying "poo poo" like our bold bunny hero. We then got on to the business of making our very own books, using pictures from magazines and old printouts.

Some of the kids chose to include images of things liked (rockets and diggers featured a lot) while others went looking for themselves and their relatives in the pile of pictures on offer.

Some of them even added some writing and illustrations of their own, showing daddy at work and baby playing and… mammy chatting. (Mammy disagreed).
As promised, here are the links!

The Library Song, a fun kids’ song from New Zealand

Lil B Dub / The Rapping Bookworm, a thing of silliness! 

Martians Discover a Book, classic Sesame Street madness

Bruno Mars Uptown Funk Parody: Unread Book (you’ll never look at your librarian in the same way!)

The Mount Desert Island High School version of Meghan Trainor's "All About The Bass/Books"

Shake it, shake it, baby!

We had an action-packed morning today in Baby Book Club! We read Shake the Tree by Silvia Borando, Chiara Vignocchi and Paolo Chiarinotti and got shaking, shaking to the left, shaking, shaking, shaking to the right. The babies got the idea very quickly and started shaking their teddy, ball, hands, etc, without being asked to. We roared with bear and bravely faced the possibility of being gobbled up. All was well in the end.
We then fixed a badly shaken tree by looking for leaves, animals and conkers to stick back on. This was also quite a brave thing to do as we had to rummage through a deep box where anything might have been lurking. But some babies were very practical and decided the sensible thing to do was to upend said box and spill everything out. So it was done.
We ended the session making it rain conkers: pop them in a paper cup, shake it, hold it high… and rain it down! Endless fun!
The tidying was a very collective affair today as well, because once the box was full again, it meant you could just…  empty it out once more.
See you all next week for our World Book Day special! 

Love is in the air

A Valentine's special today at Baby Book Club, with a lively bunch of kids who decided to geographically spread the love in every corner of the library, rather than keep it confined to our circle of bean bags…
Still, we spread our arms and hopped and jumped like Little  Nutbrown Hare and Big Nutbrown Hare, and there was some lovely inter-baby cuddles.

Our craft this week involved fine-motor skills and one of our favourite things: gluing! The room got very quiet again as we plastered our paper with stickpritt, considered where to place heart shapes of various colours and sizes, and carefully peeled star stickers off our sheets.

The result was a brilliant bunch of bunnies (sorry, hares) to say 'I love you' this Valentine's season.

As promised, here are the links to the songs and videos!

Barney! (I had to, really)

All You Need is Love by the Beatles

Isn’t She Lovely by Stevie Wonder

Beautiful Boy by John Lennon

Building it up

Today, we read about the Tiny King who is a bit lost in his great big castle, protected by his great big soldiers and eating great big dinners all on his own. We related to some of his predicaments, but we also noticed that we were somewhat luckier than him: we at least have teddies to keep us company in our big beds! 
As we looked through Taro Miura's colourful pictures we played a bit of spotting and counting and looking for our favourite things to eat. This week again, lots of conversations got started thanks to a book...
Then we moved from the 2D world of the page to the 3D world of building blocks. Inspired by the geometrical shapes of the Tiny King's castle, we built our own towers, houses and even slides! Fine motor skills, balancing, estimating, shape recognition, all came into play without anyone noticing. The best kind of learning!
As promised, the links to the songs and videos!

Suzi Shelton - Tomboy In A Princess Dress:

Bounce Patrol: Royal Finger Family Song:

Brunswick Project: King of the Castle (with goats!): 

Chapi Chapo: Le Cube Espiègle, a (psychedelic!) wordless French cartoon from the 80s full of squares and shapes like The Tiny King: